Technologies

Overview

This application combines three SRI developed technologies to estimate the
degree to which local areas, in an operational area of interest, can support
desired missions and tasks, and then uses these local estimates to select
routes for the operation being planned. The area of interest is
partitioned into a grid, as are all sources of data including a digital
terrain model, maps, and map overlays for weather, vegetation, surface
characteristics, and threats.

CME
supports the registration, visualization, and extraction of data
from all of these sources. As such, it can assemble the available data for
any cell in the imposed grid.

An evidential analysis, devloped in Gister-CL, is used to fuse and interpret the data for
a single cell. This analysis utilizes extracted data pertaining to
snow, rain, roads, waterways, slope, vegetation, and surface
characteristics to estimate mobility; it utilizes estimates of threat
types and locations, in addition to data pertaining to clear lines-of-sight,
including atmospheric visibility, terrain, vegetation, and buildings,
to arrive at a level of threat; finally these two estimates are
combined to determine an overall cost. Utilizing Gister's ability to
compile analyses, this analysis is converted into a self-contained
cost function that takes the various data as arguments and produces
the cost as a result.

Utilizing CME, this cost function is densely mapped over the area of
interest to produce a cost overlay. Given a route through this area, costs
are accumulated along the route to determine its overall risk. In general,
risk is highest when there is exposure to threats while mobility is
impeded. The best (lowest cost) route between any two points, is
efficiently calculated using the F* algorithm. Finally, based upon the
terrain model and an aerial photograph of the area, CME synthesizes
perspective views of the terrain along the selected routes, resulting in
``drive-through movies'' for visualizing route traversal.